Death Takes A Holiday

by William Young





Published at Smashwords by William Young

Copyright 2011 William Young





Los Angeles, California – Day 1





Dr. Lucinda Bright was escorted through the off-stage corridors of the airport, her mind buzzing at her sudden importance in the scheme of things. As the on-call medical liaison specializing in bloodborne pathogens for the Southern California District Anti-Terror Task Force - a title that was supposed to be little more than a resume enhancer - she'd been called away from her lab in the middle of the afternoon to provide her expert opinion on what to do with a handful of Eastern European tourists who'd been exposed to a passenger's blood on the way to Los Angeles.

She had never really expected to be called by the authorities as a result of volunteering for the task force several years earlier – and she didn’t consider herself among the authorities simply because she had a laminated plastic badge hanging around her neck – but here she was, being escorted by Transportation Security Agency officers to examine a handful of tourists on their way to Disneyland for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Tourists, not terrorists, she thought to herself, but protocols were protocols and she had volunteered all those years ago to do this job if need be.

The group turned a corner and then banged through a door into a hallway and past conference rooms, exam areas and interrogation cells into which only the unluckiest of travelers were ever escorted. The fluorescent lighting, worn low pile carpeting and dull off-white walls lent a bureaucratic dreariness to the areas which only enhanced their sense of foreboding. It was a décor perhaps intentionally designed to maximize a person’s sense of irresolvable frustration and unrealizable anger: you are helpless, submit.

�śDr. Bright?” said a man in a suit, detaching himself from a small cloud of uniformed government types from a variety of emergency services branches.

Bright nodded and smiled, �śCinda, please.”

The man hesitated a second as he shook her hand, �śCinda, I’m Special Agent Charles Hoffman with the FBI,” he said, dropping her hand and quickly flapping a badge wallet open and closed before slipping it into his jacket. �śCome with me, please.”

�śI understand we have some sort of issue with a passenger vomiting blood on a plane from Europe,” Bright said as she followed a half-step behind Hoffman, his stride quick and purposeful.

�śOh, yeah, something like that,” Hoffman said over his shoulder.

They passed through the group of paramedics, firefighters and airport police officers and stepped down the hall toward a wall with a long window. Bright felt the presence of the first responders behind her as they trailed silently along, waiting for an expert opinion on what to do next. Bright stopped and stared through the two-way window at a collection of men, women and children.

�śNone of these people look ill,” Bright said, turning to look at Hoffman. �śI was told we had a patient who had been vomiting blood on the plane.”

Hoffman nodded. �śYeah, he was taken to County General a couple of hours ago when the first responders were trying to figure out what to do with him. Apparently the TSA agents told them he would have to be classified a potential terror risk because of the vomiting, but since he was unconscious they let the medics take him out. These guys, though, are another matter.”

�śDo we know if he bled on anybody not in there?”

Hoffman shook his head. �śJust them. Family members and friends. And an unrelated couple from Italy. The flight crew reacted pretty quickly and moved him to a galley area after he started coughing up blood, but he obviously got a lot of people covered beforehand. According to them, this guy apparently stood up to go to the bathroom and just barfed over two rows of passengers.”

�śWas he sick when he got on the plane or was it something he ate?”

�śAccording to is wife, he was coming down with something when they boarded the plane in Sofia, but she said it didn't seem like anything to worry about. She figured he was getting nerves about flying,” Hoffman said. �śBut it didn’t get serious until after they switched planes in Italy, and he didn't barf on these folks until they were only about half-an-hour out from LA.”

�śWell, we’re going to need to keep everyone in the conference room in quarantine until we figure out what this guy is sick from,” Bright said. �śIf he hadn’t vomited blood on them, we could let them go, but they could be infected so they’ll just have to wait until we know. Get them showered off and find their luggage so they can wear fresh clothes.”





By the time Bright made it to County General the next morning, Hristo Gruev, 37, was dead. His body had burned through with fever and now sat in the air-conditioned morgue in the basement. The blood samples taken from him were currently going through lab analysis, leaving nothing for Bright to actually do other than wait for the results. She sipped on a cup of stale cafeteria coffee while sitting in the pathologist’s office waiting area – an end table and two plastic chairs – when her phone trilled its text message tone. It was her supervisor:

Patient died? Others still in quarantine? Tell staff autopsy is highest priority from highest authority. Probably nothing. Keep me informed of any changes

The door opened and a fiftyish man with thinning hair and a white Van Dyke beard entered, the embroidery on his lab coat read �śYul Ze’ev, MD.” He was carrying a paper cup of Starbucks coffee, the aroma of which quickly permeated the room and dwarfed the tiny coffee-like scent her cup had been offering. Bright suddenly lusted for his coffee. She stood up and unconsciously motioned toward him with her deficient cup of java.

�śDr. Ze’ev?” she asked.

�śYes, and you’re Lucinda Bright from the anti-terrorism task force, no doubt?” Ze’ev said, nodding his head amiably and smiling. �śI guess we’ve got something interesting to figure out in short order, which is more than I can normally say.”

�śYou don’t get a lot of business here?”

�śOh, sure, but it’s all cops wanting me to hurry something or reporters trying to find something out, never an actual mystery that needs to be solved.”

�śA mystery? You haven’t seen the body?”

�śHad my assistant email the file to my phone, read it over breakfast. First guess is Ebola, though it doesn’t exactly fit all the symptoms,” Ze’ev said, motioning for Bright to follow him as he pulled open the door to the examining room. �śPlenty of other diseases to consider, to be sure, but not many that have someone bleed out so quickly. It’s going to be a while, though, before any of the blood tests come out with anything. Holidays and what. But if there’s anything obvious, we should know in a couple of hours.”

�śEbola?”

�śProbably not today. A day or two, maybe.”

�śI’ve got more than a dozen people in quarantine at the airport in a conference room. A day or two? Really?”

Ze’ev shrugged. �śYou can move them somewhere, right?”

Bright let out a bitter laugh. �śYeah, according to protocol, the county jail, but that’s already over capacity, so, no.”

Ze’ev sipped his coffee and then laughed. �śYeah, that’s the government for you, it makes all sorts of plans on how to deal with things, but doesn’t do anything to actually prepare for the things it might have to deal with. You have to wonder why FEMA and the rest are surprised and off-guard every time a hurricane hits. I mean, there it is on the weather channel, building up in the ocean, moving slowly toward land, turning and turning and getting closer every day, and then when it makes landfall, everyone in government acts totally surprised at the damage it causes. Idiots.”

Bright had no idea what he was talking about and motioned to the wall of refrigerated storage compartments. �śThe body’s in one of those?”

Ze’ev nodded, sipped his coffee. �śYup. Lemme see,” he ran his finger down a roster on a computer print-out lying on a desk. �śSeventeen.”

He pulled the door open and slid out the table. Ze’ev checked the identification tag on the body and looked up at Bright, �śHristo Gruev?” Bright nodded and Ze’ev walked over to a phone on the wall, tapped in a few digits and spoke into it. He turned to Bright, �śIt’ll be a couple of minutes until they move the body onto the examining table. Come, let’s see if we can’t find anything on the preliminary intake report.”

They left the room and went into Ze’ev’s office, a cluttered space with an obsolete desktop PC, a reasonably modern laptop, and manila folders strewn about the flat surfaces of the room. The walls had dozens of photographs in black and white of what Bright assumed were Ze’ev’s trophies from autopsies: an X-ray shot of a steak knife in a skull, a photograph of a keychain in a stomach, an 8x10 of a male with a gag ball in his mouth and a cell phone in his rectum. Bright rolled her eyes.

�śLet’s see,” Ze’ev said, tapping on a tablet PC he had pulled from under a stack of papers. �śAdmitted almost seventeen hours ago, dead for nearly six. One-oh six point three temp, severe dehydration, skin lesions and blood loss from the mouth, nose, ears, penis and rectum – well, that’s all the holes. He was unconscious and pupils unresponsive. Breathing was slow, heavy perspiration. They gave him an IV solution and pushed him into a room to wait for you and your team to arrive.”

�śHe showed the first symptoms about twenty-four hours ago. It’s a fast-acting bug, whatever it is,” Bright said.

�śThat it is; nothing I’m familiar with off the top off my head,” Ze’ev said. �śSeems to go at the body’s fluids, from the looks of this, almost as if it’s trying to squeeze everything liquid out, almost as if it's trying to turn the victim into an instant mummy.”

There was a clatter from somewhere outside the room, muffled by distance and walls but still discernible as metal banging into metal. Ze’ev rolled his eyes. The banging continued for a few more seconds and then stopped. Ze’ev looked at his watch.

�śI’ll give them a few minutes to pick everything up before we head down and start the autopsy, this way we can all pretend nothing weird just happened,” Ze’ev said.





Bright followed Ze’ev down the hall and into the autopsy room and stopped in her tracks. The drawer with Hristo Gruev’s body in it was pulled open and an empty gurney lay on its side nearby, the body of a medical intern lying next to it, pooling blood onto the floor. Ze’ev rushed through the room to the fallen man, but all Bright could do was stare.

�śJason! Jason, are you okay? Can you hear me?” Ze’ev bent over the intern’s body and checked for a pulse. �śHe’s alive.”

Bright regained her composure and walked the rest of the way into the room. �śHe’s bleeding from the arm,” she said as she came alongside Ze’ev and kneeled down.

Ze’ev scrunched up the intern’s shirt sleeve and both looked in consternation at what appeared to be a bite wound on the intern’s forearm, a deep, lacerating cut which had removed a chunk of flesh.

�śIs that a bite wound?” Bright asked.

Ze’ev half-nodded. �śLooks like, but not a normal one, this is a bite for eating, not to inflict pain.”

�śGet bandages, I’ll apply pressure,” Bright said, motioning for Ze’ev to move aside. �śIs he hurt anywhere else?”

�śBanged his head pretty good hitting the floor,” Ze’ev said, standing up and hurrying to the other side of the room. He picked up the phone, �śI need a first responder unit to the morgue stat, we’ve got an injured staff that needs immediate emergency treatment.”

Ze’ev returned and placed a bandage on the wound, securing it with tape and biting off the ends.

�śWhat would have bitten him?”

Ze’ev half-stood and banged his head into the open tray door. �śJesus!” he said, his eyes rimming with tears as he shoved the tray back into the wall. He paused for a moment and focused on the intense point of pain on the crown of his head, willing it to fade away. He took a long, deep breath and opened his eyes. Ze’ev turned to Bright and shrugged. �śWho, you mean, and why?”

�śWhat do you mean?”

�śNo �Śwhat’ bit him. That’s a human mouth bite on his arm. Believe me, I’ve seen hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Usually they’re just bruises with indentations, maybe once in a while you’ll get a body in here with punctures from somebody’s mouth, but that’s rare. This wound, this bite, you never get that from a person. Dogs, yeah, sometimes. People, never,” Ze’ev said. �śWhich means you have to ask, �Śwho bit him?’”

�śAnd why?”

�śExactly,” Ze’ev said, turning to the intern and patting through his clothing for any obvious signs of other trauma.

Bright looked around the room and immediately noticed a puddle of blood on the floor near the equipment table, and a small rotary saw lying on the floor. She walked over to it and saw a spray of blood across the counter and onto the wall. The various tools were in disarray, a smear of blood across them as if they had been desperately snatched for.

�śHe doesn’t have any cut wounds on him, does he?” Bright asked.

�śNo, why?” Ze’ev said.

�śThere’s a rotary saw and some knives and such over here that have blood on them.”

Ze’ev gave her a curious look. �śThose tools should all be clean and ready for the autopsy.”

He got up and walked across the room and looked down at the equipment. Ze’ev gave Bright a look of mild bewilderment and almost shrugged. �śLet me see if I can’t get a hold of Marcus. He should have been here helping Jason, anyway. Maybe he knows what’s going on.”

Ze’ev picked the phone off the hook on the wall, punched in a code, and spoke. Overhead, the speakers let out the muffled, softened sound of Ze’ev’s voice calling for Marcus Glass to come to the morgue examining room. Behind them there was a slight groan and the shuffling of fabric against concrete, the gentle sound of the double-doors swinging to a close. Ze’ev turned.

�śWhat the fu�"yee-oww!” Ze’ev said, his voice changing from deep confusion to clear pain.

Bright spun around and stared for a moment at the sight of Hristo Gruev biting deeply into Ze’ev’s neck, Gruev’s hands clasped tightly around Ze’ev’s right arm and shoulder, blood coursing down Ze’ev shirt and gurgling up across Gruev’s bared teeth and lips. Ze’ev smacked Gruev with his left palm several times, his hand making dull slaps on Gruev’s forehead but doing nothing to phase Gruev. Bright took a pair of steps sideways and tried to make sense of what she was looking at: Gruev should be dead.

Yul Ze’ev let out a second yell now. It was an animalistic plea for help from the heavens, a sound uttered by uncountable numbers of prey as they realized the bite they were suffering would be fatal, the grasp of the claws un-releasable; that life was rapidly coming to a close should some divine intervention not materialize. Bright recognized the sound on some primal level, and she moved forward quickly and grabbed Gruev’s right arm at the biceps and elbow, trying to bend it up and away from its grip on Ze’ev.

But Gruev did not budge. Beneath her fingertips she could feel the thick deadness of Gruev’s arm, as if she were grabbing modeling clay. His body temperature should have been that of the morgue’s storage tray’s refrigeration, but instead he was almost room temperature, a trace warmth that should not have been inside of a dead body. She could hear him breathing as he resisted her attempt to move his arm, a slow, almost-silent in-and-out of air that would've been lost in the sound of the room's ventilation were she not so close. She flicked her eyes to Gruev’s face and watched as he slowly moved his head from side to side, trying to bite off a piece of Ze’ev neck. Gruev’s eyes were slits, his brows furrowed with intense concentration.

The air was filled with sudden noise and commotion, and a half-second later she was pulled away from Gruev and Ze’ev while a pair of paramedics wrenched Gruev off of Ze’ev, each medical technician taking one of Gruev’s arms at the shoulder and breaking him off of the pathologist. Ze’ev collapsed, his arms around his neck, blood seeping through his fingers.

Bright turned and watched the paramedics as they struggled with Gruev, a lump of Ze’ev’s neck in his mouth. Gruev wriggled to break free of the paramedics while he continued chewing, his naked body streaked with rivulets of blood. Although he was supposed to be dead, Gruev was winning the wrestling match with the two paramedics, slowly breaking their grips on him.

�śCall security,” the paramedic on the left said to her, his voice tinged with annoyance more than fear.

Bright rushed over the phone on the wall, picked up the handset and scanned it for a listing of punch codes, found it and entered the numbers.

�śSecurity.”

�śHello, I’m Dr. Lucinda Bright from-,” she paused a moment, composed herself. �śI need security to the morgue operating room as quickly as possible. We’ve got a patient who’s attacked two staff members and is currently engaging two emergency medical technicians. Please hurry as both staff have suffered serious wounds and are in need of emergency medical treatment.”





Taking Gruev down had required the use of two Tasers, and even then Gruev had only been stunned long enough for the security guards to fix a pair of handcuffs on him before he had started to try to get up off the floor. Unable to rise, Gruev had spun slowly on the floor, his legs pushing him lazily, aimlessly, relentlessly.

Ze’ev and the intern had both been taken to the emergency department for treatment and each was unconscious. Marcus Glass was dead, his body had been found down the hallway from the morgue, his throat torn out and right thumb bitten off. Hristo Gruev, pronounced dead only eleven hours earlier, was now strapped to a bed in a room with a two-way mirror, a pair of armed sheriff's officers outside the door to the room, an Internet camera focused on him and monitors of every sort imaginable plugged into his should-be lifeless body.

But there he was on the other side of the glass wall, moaning incoherently and straining against the bed's leather straps, a fact that totally baffled Bright and Special Agent Hoffman. He turned away from the glass and shook his head slightly, perturbed.

�śWe’re sure he was 100 percent dead?” Hoffman asked.

�śWell, I wasn’t the attending, but according to his chart, he died,” Bright said. �śThere was no heart rate on the cardiac monitor. No active breaths. They did an apnea test and the CO2 was greater than 120 without any breaths. The only thing confusing throughout all of this is that Gruev's body temp never got below 104 despite the environmental cold and lack of any other vitality in the vital signs. His brain was cooked. He was dead.”

�śAll the way dead?” Hoffman asked �śI mean, there’s no chance he was kind of almost dead, and putting him in the refrigerated drawer in the morgue might have put him in hibernation or something?”

Bright wanted to roll her eyes in disbelief, but, clearly, something had gone wrong and Hristo Gruev hadn’t died. She shrugged. �śI don’t know. I’ve never heard of something like this happening, but there’s a first time for everything.”

Hoffman stepped up to the glass and leaned close to it, staring through it at the man strapped to the bed, blood trickling out of the corners of his mouth, his fingers clawing at the sheets.

�śWhat does he have? Rabies?” Hoffman asked. �śWould that make him attack people like that?”

�śI don’t think so,” Bright said. �śSome of the symptoms are similar: fever, twitching, the strange breathing pattern. But I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of blood loss like this.”

�śCouldn’t that maybe be the foaming at the mouth you hear about?”

Bright shook her head. �śNo, but I’m going to test for it, anyway. Something’s wrong with him.”

�śSo, what do we do with the rest of the people who’ve come in contact with him?” Hoffman asked. �śI’ve got a dozen people who’ve been waiting in an airport conference room since yesterday afternoon and I don’t think I’m going to be able to hold them there much longer.”

�śWe're going to hold them another twenty-four hours. If they don't exhibit any symptoms, they should be okay,” Bright said. �śWe’ll want to notify this guy’s wife we’ve got him here and bring her in so we can get the required authorizations for treatment, but the rest can go to Disneyland if nobody gets sick.”

�śWhat about the people he came in contact with here?”

Bright poured a cup of coffee from the pot in the observation room, added some Coffee Mate to it and swirled it into a tan color. She sipped and thought.

�śWe’ve got the two injured men in separate rooms, under observation with guards outside their rooms to prevent accidental exposures to unauthorized people, so we should be okay on that account,” Bright said, walking up to the wall alongside Hoffman. �śThe other man, Marcus Glass, died from his wounds. His body was transferred to a funeral home about an hour ago. I met his parents and explained what happened, as best I could, but they couldn't believe we thought Gruev was dead."

Bright took a sip of coffee and considered the situation, turned her head to Hoffman and sniffed out a tiny laugh, �śI’m sure someone will get sued because of this.”





Author's Note: This is the first in a series of short stories that will be released weekly throughout the final months of 2011 and into early 2012. The stories are not in chronological order, but they are in an order.





About the Author

William Young can fly helicopters and airplanes, drive automobiles, steer boats, rollerblade, water ski, snowboard, and ride a bicycle. He was a newspaper reporter for more than a decade at five different newspapers. He has also worked as a golf caddy, flipped burgers at a fast food chain, stocked grocery store shelves, sold ski equipment, worked at a funeral home, unloaded trucks for a department store and worked as a uniformed security guard. He lives in a small post-industrial town along the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania with his wife and three children.





Also by William Young

The Signal (Paperback only)

The Divine World (Paperback. SmashWords.)

Monster (SmashWords.)





Cities of the Dead: Stories from the Zombie Apocalypse

Death Takes a Holiday - Day 1 (Smashwords.)

Days Go By - Day 132 (Smashwords.)

Killing Country Music - Day 117 (Smashwords.)

Waiting for the Great Leap Forward (Smashwords.)